TMCnet News
The Advertiser As Enemy(AllAfrica Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) The on-going drama, including the sustained allegations of unethical marketing practices, being levelled against an unidentified 'major player' in the brewery industry is our concern today. The allegations are coming from a non-governmental organisation called Consumer Rights Advocacy Network of Nigeria (CRANN). On the face of it, it is commendable that someone should show some concern about what the Nigerian public has to suffer in the name of advertisements. I recall a perfectly shameless advert intended to promote a particular brand of car air freshener. It showed an old man in his car who was able to attract some young students for curious engagements, simply because his car smelt nice. Whereas the intended message was 'our air freshener is very good', the message the advert conveyed is 'women are so cheap that all you need to get them is invite them into a nice smelling car'. We say nothing about the promotion of promiscuity, lasciviousness and womanising, which drowned the actual message of the advert. But the title of this piece is not new. For the record, it was first used in my column in The Guardian newspapers in the early nineties, to address the issue of poorly vetted or possibly un-vetted advertisements inflicted on the viewing public by marketers of a certain health care products. The advertisements in question had moved beyond their intended brief of urging the public to take precautions in their sexual behaviour, to giving the reprehensible impression that availability of the protective product is passport to licentious behaviour. One of the said adverts, after advising the public to be careful in their sexual behaviour, ended with a 10-second footage that overturned the intended message. It showed a motor mechanic winking at the camera and heading towards a rather peculiar section of his garage with a young female food vendor, after procuring the protective equipment. This last footage defeated the very purpose of the advertisement. So, just as the title of today's piece is not new its subject matter i.e. propriety issues in advertising, is not; unless the reader sees newness in the fact that today's piece is talking about the propriety of an NGO supporting one product owner and marketer against another. The product in question is alcoholic beverage. One may not have a very strong reputation for indulging in 'responsible' intake of such beverage at social hours and in environments of less than robust visibility in the evenings. But this does not disqualify one from commenting on the issues on the table here. My first worry about this NGO is that it is taking up just the matter of advert competition between two brewers, amidst many other issues on which the adverts are clearly unethical, or at least questionable. The second issue is best captured in this question: Why should CRANN, an NGO, see itself as an advocate for and on behalf of competing organisations in the alcoholic drink industry? The organisation's advocacy adverts in the national dailies and the lop-sidedness of the campaign seems a bit curious. It may well be either a case of misapplication of marketing terms, or it is simply the outsourcing of a fight for a fee by an embattled product owner. If NGOs now exist to bring just one company down and promote another, then that is an innovation. Robust civil society organisations and NGOs can legitimately establish common ground with the citizens and use mass endorsement and third party validation to continually drive the highest standards of good governance in its chosen sphere of relevance. This is what makes them credible advocates and watchdogs of government, businesses and the society: the ombudsmen for a better society. The current CRANN campaign, with its multimillions of naira advertisement campaign against a brewery it refused to name does not make sense at all. It is also accusing the unnamed brewery of de-marketing its competitor. Now, what is this? As grievous as any charge of undercutting one's competitors may be in real terms, raising issues against such practices, by a third party, cannot be handled in such a stupendously funded manner without raising eyebrows. CRANN has assured the reading public that it has evidence of how the unnamed brewery "has gone about de-marketing its competitor", even adding libellously that "This brewery has been granting incentives to key retailers who it requests not to stock, display or sell the products of its main rival, in a manner that restricts the space of consumers for choice." So where is the Advertising Practitioners' Council (APCON) in all of this? What is the name of this erring brewery, so that the issues can be taken to the appropriate quarters and be done with? Whereas this NGO may actually be an honest and deeply ethical organisation, its failure to put a name or face to its allegations smacks of sponsored connivance and conspiratorial gang up to blackmail a possibly more successful competitor. That an NGO, a non-profit making organisation is running a campaign already valued at over N20 million, based on the number of full page adverts already published in national dailies within the last two weeks alone? Is it true that this NGO once worked for the organisation it is now defending? Does the operational office address provided by it exists and is in use? This is not a matter for speculation, because anyone can verify for himself or herself whether the address in question exists; and whether a fake address strengthens anyone's case in any advocacy. As for the talk about 'de-marketing' a competitor and 'pirate marketing' as concepts in modern marketing, there seems to be an oblique assault on advertising lexicon. A simple empirical definition of terms tells us that Pirate Marketing is "A term describing the so-called 'marketing strategy' of spammers who 'advertise' or plug their products and services by using people's email addresses to send out bulk mail messages to all the contacts they've hijacked, pretending the email was written by the person who's identity they have hacked into". Surely, this is not what the unnamed brewery is doing. De-Marketing on the other hand, is defined by businessdictionary.com as "Efforts aimed at discouraging (not destroying) the demand for a product which (1) a firm cannot supply in large-enough quantities, or (2) does not want to supply in a certain region where the high costs of distribution or promotion allow only a too little profit margin." The explanation goes further to say that de-marketing strategies include higher prices, scaled-down advertising, and product redesign. So who has inflicted higher prices, product redesign and scaled-down advertising on the brewers CRANN is defending? The foregoing suggests that only a product or brand promoter can de-market itself. We may speak of its being undercut by competitors, in which case the matter should be taken up by the appropriate regulatory agency (ies). In some adverts, even while pretending to be masking the breweries in question, you could see two bottles, one branded 'Surulere' and the other 'Ogba'. Which brewery operates from Ogba and which operates from Surulere? This is pathetic, even if we accept the claim that the said unethical competitor has been granting key retailers juicy incentives for preferential product displays and sales. What is the proof and what is the disadvantaged competitor doing: paying members of staff of its marketing department for collecting data on who is not allowing them to sell? It is an acceptance of failure for an organisation to go whining all over town, even if by proxy. There is a law of demand and supply, I dare say. No GSM vendor imposes an Airtel recharge card on someone who wants MTN or Etisalat recharge cards. At the very least, one expects whoever has a case against a competitor to go to the regulatory authorities with facts to report the erring competitor. It is then for the regulators to intervene and give the accused an opportunity to respond to the allegations. Has anyone done this? Should that not have been the interest of an unbiased NGO that is focused on public good and interests? Innuendos and subterfuge only further discredit the presumed beneficiary of such 'NGO' campaign. Going by the branding of the bottles in one of the sponsored adverts, it is easy to see that the small bottle branded 'Ogba' is referring to Guinness Nigeria Plc, as it is the only brewery in Ogba. The big bottle, branded 'Surulere', can be easily suspected to be referring to Nigerian Breweries Plc, which operates from Surulere. Could it be that the disappointing results recently released by Guinness Nigeria Plc is being blamed on another brewery, which is thereby being accused of 'pirate marketing' and 'de-marketing'? I hope not, even for the respected image of the latter company and its brand. As another global competitor, SABMiller from South Africa, is breaking new grounds since its arrival in Nigeria, some embattled breweries may fail to buckle up but prefer to go sit long enough to also cry and roll on the ground. Copyright This Day. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). |